Eckhart, Kabbalah, and the Limits of Psychological Inquiry

Abstract

Elizabeth A. a~ Reading Renuncitltion: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 169. 19 This takes us back to the debate between Hadot and Foucault about the primacy of ethics. 20 As for suffering, Eckhart suggests different things in different places. Sennon 86, perhaps, .offers a corrective to a possible misreading of detaehmen~ whereby it is viewed as a state of impassability, in which the soul feels neither sorrow or joy. Yet if we return to Sermon 2, it is clear that Eckhart does want to downplay the role of suffering in the soul's relationship to the divine. Anything suffered on behalf of God, Eckhart insists, is easy and sweet, for God carries the burden. Moreover, the joy experienced in participation in the divine self·birth is so great that if ... God never gave him the kingdom of heaven, he still would have received a reward great enough for all that he had ever suffering, for God is present in this power as he is in the eternal now (179). The Book of Divine Consolation, written to Queen Agnes of Hungary, perhaps after the murder of her father, shows that Eckhart could even go so far as to render sorrow itself divine: everything the good human being suffers for God's sake, he suffers in God, and God is suffering with him in his But if my suffering is in God and God is suffering with me, how then can suffering be sorrow to me. if suffering loses its SOIlOW, and my sorrow is in God, and my sorrow is God? Truly, as God is Truth and as I find the Truth, I find my God, the Truth, there; and too, neither less nor more, as I find pure suffering for the love of God and in God, I find God my suffering. (The Book of Divine Consolation, p..235) Although Eckhart insists that Christ takes on human suffering, thereby making humans equal to the divine and able to share in the divine self-birth, the primary technique of self-fonnation is not meditation on and imitation of Christ's human (bodily and spiritual) suffering, but rather detaelurent from creatureliness. This marks, I think, an important critique of the ethicaVascetic practices of the latter Middle Ages, one particularly crucial for women, whose sanctity was most dependent on the valorization of suffering and one the condemnations of POIete and Eckhart rendered, for the most part, ineffectual.